Rebranding as a Crisis Response Strategy: A Stakeholder Perspective

This article addresses the gap in crisis response literature by exploring rebranding as crisis response from a stakeholder relationship management perspective, drawing from the collaborative pillars of co-creation, social capital, sense-making, and sense-giving. The rebranding of Facebook to Meta is explored as a pragmatic scancis (a crisis that transfigures into a scandal) to understand its rebranding strategy as a crisis response. Through the thematic analysis of 50 online articles published between September 2021 and November 2021, a strong emphasis was placed on the crisis Facebook/Meta was facing, leading to the rebrand. Using the theoretical lens of primary and secondary crisis response strategies, it was found that Facebook/Meta used a defensive approach to divert the attention of stakeholders with the brand, while limited evidence was found that Facebook/Meta prioritized their stakeholders in their secondary crisis response. The process of influencing the sense-making and meaning construction of stakeholders by Meta was considered negatively and thus not aligned with the concept of sense-making, resulting in its inability to co-create a rebranded company that garnered the support of its stakeholders. This article moves beyond existing studies that focus on the building blocks of stakeholder relations in crisis response contexts through an exploration of four collaborative pillars of social capital, co-creation sense-making, and sense-giving. The article uniquely extends rebranding to crisis response literature by proposing a rebranding co-creation framework that provides much-needed guidelines to organizations facing a morally induced crisis.